Sohrab ahmari murrays latest much discussed book, tyranny inc, how private power crushed american liberty and what to do about it. Tonights gathering is organized by the Bottom Community foundation. Founded last year, the bcf seeks to advance appreciation for roman law, greek philosophy and judeochristian religion as the foundations of western civilization. It does this by promoting scholarship up offering Educational Programs for students and Young Professionals and offering conferences and copia like tonights event. This event is also sponsored by my organization, the american conservative of the american conservative or tech for short, exists to advance a mainstream vision for conservatism. We pursue our mission primarily through our print magazine and online journalism, as well as select conferences and events like the one youre attending here tonight. We were founded in 2000 to over 20 years ago now to reignite conversation that we felt conservatives had neglected for far too long. Our magazine was a rare voice against the iraq war. In the early days of that conflict and a commitment to a Foreign Policy of realism, restraint continues to animate our publication today, but our mission was broader than that. One issue we also wanted to return considerations of faith and family. Those civilizational foundations, to the center of our political discourse. And we felt that they were all they were too often simply played paid lip service and then ignored when when policymaking. And perhaps most pertinent to tonights discussion, we wanted to recalibrate the conversation around political economy on the political right. We wanted to advance the interests of American Workers against an increasingly globalized free trade regime that prioritized corporate profits over the concerns of real workers in the real economy. Now, if you read tyranny, think, which i believe the Washington Post called anomalously sensible, which i guess is a compliment, but if you read it like the Washington Post did, youll find many stories of these real workers attempting to navigate an order that is often stacked against them. And in many ways, the book echoes the disposition that has animated our magazines pages for 21 years now a healthy skepticism of bigness in all forms and a preference for main street over wall street. But we also welcome honest disagreement and debates about the best ways to advance those interests. So i hope well be able to get into some these discussions sparked by scrubs, provocative prescriptions and tyranny. Think here tonight and weve got a great lineup of speakers for you to do just that. So before we start, i want to introduce tonights tonights speakers before handing it over to the author of the book. That brings us here tonight. First sohrab ahmari, of course, the founder and editor of compact magazine. A contributing editor to our publication, the american conservative. And a contributing writer for the new statesman. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at news corp as an editor and columnist with the wall street journal in new york, london, and as the op ed editor, the new york post. His book, which were here to discuss, is, of course, tyranny inc how private power crushed american liberty and what to do about it. Just out from Penguin Random house. If you havent picked up a caveat, please do. Next, marco rubio, of course, the senior u. S. Senator from florida and the author most recently of of decadence how our spoiled elites blew americas inheritance of, liberty, security and prosperity, which was published earlier this year. Matthew stoller is director of research at the American Economic liberties project and author of the 100 year war between monopoly power and democracy. Published by simon and schuster in 2019, soler has served as a policy adviser to the Senate Budget committee and writes the Big Newsletter a monopoly as. Speaker crowder is a labor unionist in baltimore, a contributor to compact magazine. And last but certainly not least is my colleague, the american conservative Bradley Devlin he is our Staff Reporter doing excellent work for us. If youve read bradlees work, you may think that hes older than his. Hes actually very young. So one of those gen zers who has no memories of that terrible day, 21 years ago, 22 years ago, just. And who can give us a perspective of conservatives who have come of age during the height of much of the private tyranny and scrubs book. So just a quick couple notes here on how tonights event will proceed. So, sir, i will start us off in just a few minutes here with some opening remarks. Drawing from his books, core arguments for about 10 to 15 minutes after that, we will remarks from senator rubio for another 10 to 15 minutes. And then afterward i will invite the full panel to join us here on stage for discussion. If there is time. And as you can see, our schedule is very tightly packed. But if we do have time, we will take one or two questions from the audience at the very end. Either way, though, we will close promptly at 7 45 p. M. So can move on to their own dinner plans. And i would note though, please do remain your seats after the panel to allow speakers to leave first. So with that please, join me in welcoming sohrab ahmari. My friends. Thank you all. Thank you all for being here. I should start by saying im grateful to the Bynum Community foundation and the american conservative for this gathering. Gathering thanks especially to emil for his steadfast support for my work and thanks to to the panelists. Not least, senator rubio, who has shown genuine and rare leadership in pushing his party, my party to rethink some of its Political Economic dogmas and whos been kind enough to take to both to endorse this book and now to time out of a busy legislative schedule to appear at this event. So to begin, id like to pan out to a global picture. For years, defenders of freedom have been warning of a democratic recession beginning in the 1970s and then especially after the collapse of the soviet union. Dozens of societies built coercion gave way to ones built on consent. More recently, however, coercion has made a comeback with regions backsliding into club authoritarianism and ideological dictatorship to. See the severity of freedoms global funk. Consider a single news story from china where the gleaming democratic horizon opened up by earlier market reforms have now been shuttered by xi jinpings regime. It was in the spring of 2020, the height of the pandemic. Jean mink, a meatpacker at a massive slaughterhouse complex. Nanjing, had had enough. The state owned firm subjects its workers to a digital panopticon, tracking their every move. Communist party bosses make no bones about the purpose of this. All present surveillance. Its to stoke a culture of reminding workers that the government is continually monitoring them and failure to meet quotas, or, as they put it, wasting the peoples time results in docked pay at the outset of, the pandemic, chinese authorities identified slaughterhouses as essential enterprise, as management ordered employees to put in ever longer shifts with scant regard for the risk of viral contagion. At a moment when covid and its mitigation were poorly understood, that cavalier attitude prompted zhang, our protagonist, to act. One day in april, he led a walkout of his colleagues. Their demand was reasonable. They called simply for the complex to be temporary, early closed and more stringently sanitize. Zhang was terminated that very day, framing the walkout as a violation of covid rules. The firms general counsel denounced zhangs actions as unacceptable and arguably illegal and, quote in internal memos voicing dissent, a state owned firm in the peoples republic never exactly easy could now be framed as a sanitary threat. Zhang remains unemployed and china continues to silence dissident workers. And too fiercely resist efforts to them actually allied sort of none of these things took place in the middle kingdom. I borrowed the language of my fake, but all too real news story almost from reporting about events that transpired right here, the United States. It a government owned chinese slaughterhouse that uses a digital panopticon to surveil its workers, punishing them for even minor lapses. And it wasnt a chinese slaughterhouse that terminated a worker for leading a walkout at the height of the pandemic over. The employers careless attitude toward the novel coronavirus. No, that would be the u. S. Conglomerate amazon, founded by jeff bezos, the real john ming is named Christian Smalls, an expert here at amazons jfk et warehouse on warehouse on staten island. At the height of the pandemic, he became alarmed as his colleagues became sick. The Human Resources department dismissed his concerns, telling another worker to keep illness on the down low. According to the new york times. Then he led his walkout. The act for amazon fired him. Amazons lawyer described smalls, whose African American as, quote, not smart or articulate. According to internal memos obtained by vice magazine vice news, i apologize. This from the same company that a few months later would elbow way to the fore forefront of corporate black lives matter activism in the wake of George Floyds murder in minneapolis. Since then, smalls has fought organize the 8000 workers at jfk, eight, despite ferocious antiunion activity typical of the firm, including, quote, confiscating prounion pamphlets left in the break room and where workers congregated on the sidewalk. According to the times, were used to thinking of coercion as something that happens over there by Training Systems that lack checks and balances our own. And of course, those regimes are as far as their state systems go, far more coercive than ours. But when we stop thinking about things in just purely geographic terms and focus instead on who is meting out the coercion we reach an unsettling new understand. Coercion is all too common in supposedly societies like ours provided we Pay Attention to private power and admit the of private tyranny, our reigning economic ideology tells us that in the private sector, no one can force us to do anything. Competition ensures that were always free to find a better deal elsewhere. The arch laissez faire theorist f. A. Hayek, for example, had hailed, quote, competition as the only method by which our activist use can be adjusted to each other without coercive authority and, quote Milton Friedman likewise insisted that the central feature Market Society is that it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of his activities and quotes. But this is utopian in some ways as idealist and dangerous and as other modern utopias that came to legitimate real world repression in the previous century. Market utopianism has yielded a society shot through with private coercion coercion that we cant contest at the ballot box or in the system, or by other democratic means, and give and take precise sleep because its labeled private. Take the fact that a third of the 25 million americans employed in food service and retail received less than a weeks notice of their upcoming schedules. According to university of california sociologist Daniel Schneider and courier kristen hartnett. Just in time, scheduling is intended to shift the downsides associated with periods of low demand onto employees. In addition to wage precarity, because you can never be sure if you have enough wages and financial instability that results from that. Workers treated this report sleeping poorly and suffering mentally as a result, and their children are more likely to show signs of anxiety and to act out and misbehave in school. And it doesnt take a Rocket Scientist to connect the causal dots. Its a predictable result of their parents to spend regular time with them. Then there are todays lopsided employment agreements. These days, when you sign the dotted line for a new job, you agree to a neartotal surveillance of your digital life, including the confiscation of your personal devices, the use of Keylogger Software to monitor communications and even the recording of your voice and personal likeness. For commercial licensing, its no longer just about, you know, using your picture in a company or consider commercial arbitration a process originally intended resolving disputes between merchants of relatively equal bargaining power. Thanks mostly to supreme conservatives, i might say practically rewriting the 1925 federal arbitration act, the share of nonunion firms subjected their workers to mandatory arbitration has exploded to 54 as of 2017, up from 2 in 1992, according to scholars kathryn stone and alexander colvin, the employee win rates in these privatize socalled courts is just 21 , which is 59 , as is as often as in federal courts, and only 38 as often in state. Corporations, meanwhile enjoy what scholars call repeat player advantage. The more often a firm appears before a private arbitrator, the less likely its employees are to prevail. Arbitrary clauses, moreover, frequently bar employees from joining forces to vindicate they otherwise would enjoy under statutory law even when going it alone would be manifestly unjust, not to mention irrational. In one notorious case, a low level employee of accounting, ernst and young, would have had shell out some 200,000, a figure not disputed by ernst and young in expenses to recover roughly 4,000 for wage underpayment under the fair labor standards act. Justice neil gorsuch for a narrow high court majority, upheld that outcome on the grounds that the employee had freely contracted to arbitrate his disputes. In fact, ernst and young presented the arbitration clause in an email long after this employee, Stephen Morris, as his name, had been hired and he had to consent as a condition of continued employment. In other words, he was told, if you show up to work, the next day going forward, you agree to submit your disputes to arbitration. And according to a certain kind of classical economic theory thats very popular among the judiciary, but completely with real life. At that point, Stephen Morris had the ability renegotiate his agreement or or press for better. But in reality, as most of you know, what he really had to do was the only choice is to show up to work the next day because he had to pay a mortgage and pay for elder care and child care and so on. So things have to be this way. A better model would admit that coercion is inevitable in all human affairs, least in market activity. It would recognize that unchecked private coercion makes a mockery of our democratic ideals, and it would insist such coercion be ameliorated by more robust political give and take between the asset rich few and the asset less many. This is the promise of what i call private. Sorry, what i call Political Exchange capital ism. It was the philosophy that underpinned the new deal generating the mass prosperity that defined the three decades after world two and crucially, it formed a bipartisan consensus winning the allegiance, not just of progressives. But an earlier generation of conservatives. From eisenhower to nixon. These men werent starry eyed socialists, but hard nose realists whom experience had alerted to the dangers of unchecked market power. Political exchange capitalism describes world as it really is not the preindustrial arcadia of yeoman farmers and independent. The premise for much market utopian ideology, but a machine driven economy characterized a few colossal firms dominating most industries. Its chief aspect as the economist john kenneth noted, is the absence of real price competition. That is the one thing supposedly needful under classical economic theory to prevent private coercion. That pattern had emerged by the late 19th century and has hardened since big tech rule ad markets, for example, would bring tears of embarrassment to the monocle. The eyes of any gilded age tycoon. Galbraith wrote, if there are only a handful of firms in a typical industry, it follows that privately economic, economic power is less the exception than the rule. Instead of waving competition as a talisman against Political Exchange, capitalism strengthens the hands of those subjugated by private, private power, especially in the labor market. Thus, the new dealers resolved to make it easier for workers to mount what Karl Galbraith famously called countervailing power. After decades in which government had hindered them from doing so, sometimes with brutal violence, countervailing power is similar to competition. Only here, the counter pressure is exerted on the same side of a given market, not between producers or between employees and so on, but on the other side of a market not with competitors, but with customers and suppliers. As galbraith explained in this way, private economic is held in check by the counter veiling power of those who are subjugated to it. The first begets the second and justice sometimes requires state action. Something even laissez faire types admit. So labor markets promoting countervailing power require requires government backing to offset the asymmetry that is otherwise created by employees going up against a few employers. Otherwise, most rationally choose to put up with a bully boss or to suffer precarious hours and low wages. Or rather, take the risks associated with action. This was the logic behind the 1935 Labor Relations national Labor Relations act, which sought to encourage unionization and collective bargaining, and the 1938 fair labor standards act, which created federal minimum wage and overtime protections. The result . Union membership peaked in 1945 at 33 , up from 2. 7 at the turn of the 20th century and remained high throughout the 1950s and sixties. Under prenew deal conditions, the asset class went to survive or pitched battles against bosses that sometimes thr